These Pages
by anniarkie
Summary: "Can't you see? It should have been you putting me to bed tonight." Edward can't seem to move on from past love. Is all really lost? Rated M for language and eventual lemons. AH, J/E Slash!


**AN: Thanks for reading! All standard disclaimers apply - recognizable characters are the property of SM. I just like to play with them. Story will eventually merit an M rating for M/M lovin'. **

* * *

Jasper,

There's some things I'd like to say to you. That I would say to you, if you were here with me tonight. If you weren't a thousand miles away with _her_, in your new life completely removed from _me_.

I may or may not have had a few drinks tonight. It doesn't matter that I'm just inebriated enough to let myself feel unabashed; what matters is this:

I've thought about you every day for the past four years.

And trust me when I tell you that no amount of drinking will make me forget. I've tried that approach, and, as evidenced by this pathetic, never-to-be-mailed letter to you, it was a failure. It's not that I want to think about you every day, it's just that I can't ignore your absence. It's this feeling of ghost pains that has inexplicably not improved with time.

I would tell you this, and if I let my pride slip just enough in my current state, I'd ask you if you ever thought of me still. I'm just enough of a masochist to want to know the answer. Because there's no good answer to that question, is there? Either you don't think of me, in which case I feel like ever more of a fucking idiot living in some fictitious, love-hued dreamland, population of one, or you do think of me. And if you do, oh, Jasper. If you do? Hope is not always humane.

I've tried so hard to not be this person.

Can't you see? It should have been you putting me to bed tonight. You would have laughed at my tipsy rambling. You would have remarked that only _I_ would speak more eloquently (and more gregariously) _after_ a few drinks. You would have pulled the covers up over me, curled up behind me and trailed the backs of your fingers down my bare arm as you ghosted you nose across my shoulder. You would have listened to whatever late night, disconnected thoughts exited my unfiltered mouth and kissed my shoulder blade. How could you not see? How could you not know?

I'm putting myself to bed tonight, Jasper. I'm trying not to think about your fingertips trailing a lazy path down a softer, shorter arm.

I'm trying to forget that, for a time, I was complete. I'm failing, Jasper, but I'm still trying so very much.

Edward.

* * *

In hindsight, I couldn't honestly tell you why I started dating James that fall after graduating from UW. We met while I was an undergraduate, and we had mutual friends. We orbited each other for so long in our common social climate that I guess it was inevitable we'd eventually synch. It was convenience, I guess, and loneliness. And although we never got in so deep as to discuss less convenient things like feelings, or motives, or hopes, I would guess the same was true for him. It was a bad idea from the start, and I knew better.

Please know I realize how terrible that sounds - give me a little bit of credit. All I can say is that, in my defense, I was a twenty two year old recent college grad who was still somewhat shell-shocked from the demise of my previous and longest-lasting relationship to date. Wait, this isn't helping. Okay, the honest truth? I was a mess up until about yesterday when it comes to relationships. I wasn't able to make heads or tails of my own feelings, wasn't able to sort through what was good for me versus what felt good at the time, and I certainly wasn't capable of verbalizing what I wanted. I couldn't tell anyone, myself included, what it was I needed.

When you grow up extraordinarily shy, and spend the better part of your childhood immersed in your own isolated world of make-believe, there are certain skills you don't develop. I was sent forth into the world of adulthood with paltry knowledge of how to connect with another human being. Somehow, I still managed to date in college. Even more remarkably, I managed to maintain one noteworthy relationship, with Jacob, for two years before I realized that all along, I'd comprised but one third of the total participants. That is a story, as they say, for perhaps another time.

At this point you probably think I'm a deeply damaged, possibly narcissistic human being, and you might be partly right. What I'm trying to say is that given the shortcomings of my still-developing brain, my motives for dating James were less than meritorious, but not maliciously so. I just didn't know what the fuck I was doing.

It's the least deliberated decisions that sometimes have the greatest impact on a person's life. I didn't think much about why I was or if I even should be dating James that fall after I graduated from college. My plans for the future had been demolished in the same firestorm that signaled the end of my relationship with Jacob. Did I mention I didn't know what I was doing? That sentiment pervaded my life, clearly.

By now you're also convinced I'm a snarky, self-ridiculing bastard. I'm not sure I'm convinced otherwise myself.

I also gave little thought to the decision to go with James to an off-campus party a few weeks after we'd begun seeing each other. Truthfully, we'd only been on a handful of dates, and engaged in one or two sexless sleepovers. It wasn't a relationship yet, per say, as it was a casual exploration built upon a mutual attraction and boredom. I may be a cynical, flawed narcissist, but I'm honest. Blunt, if you will.

I thought little of it because I knew this party would be like every other one I'd ever attended while I was still at student at UW. For a shy person, familiar social spheres are safe territory. I liked that I knew what to expect. Even though I'd graduated, I'd likely recognize some of the faces and be able to find a few people to make small talk with. I would go to this party, and it would be an unremarkable page in the book of my life. I was already thinking ahead to the next, blank leaf of my volume.

I struggle to remember the finer details of James' face, though when I concentrate I recall that he was several inches shorter than my own six foot tall frame. His face, somewhat obscured by time, is still framed by dark, thick hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had a stocky, muscular build that, in truth, was the focal point for my attraction to him. I may not remember who drove whom to that party so many years ago, and I may not remember exactly what color his eyes were, but I remember feeling his heaviness and strength as he leaned into me. My back against a water heater in the open, shabby kitchen, his head buried in my shoulder, his hands inching up and up.

Once this memory is placed in context, you will perhaps understand why instead of being a highlight, it blends with the text of much of that night. There are no notes in the margin to indicate a casual reader had given pause at this salacious little nibble. As James began his first, and only, exploration of my throat in the warm corner of the kitchen, the sound of breaking glass could be heard over the cacophony of dancing and drunkun singing. A girl from one of my Junior year electives had jumped up onto the glass-top stove with such force that the surface had shattered beneath her, causing her to momentarily halt her impassioned makeout session with a girl who I recognized from local gay activist events.

The party was, I should mention, a fundraiser for my college's gay straight alliance. The annual event drew in college students and local queers mostly due to its reputation as being a debauched ordeal with abundant opportunities for sexual escapades outside most students' traditional comfort zones. I suppose being groped against a water heater while being pressed in by a crowd of clumsy, partially clothed undergraduates would have normally been outside of my comfort zone as well, so who am I to judge? Whether it was a sexual curiosity, a latent voyeurism, or simply the promise of cheap alcohol, bodies in the door meant a better operating budget for the gay straight alliance. Not that any of these got me through the door that night, of course. That decision, if it can be called that, was a mere whim.

I entered the door of the house hosting the party twice, technically. I entered once with my date, and I entered a second time some hours later, after a trip into the front yard. It was another thoughtless decision, you see, that brought me outside for some fresh air. I didn't think far enough ahead to understand that the chilly October air would force me back inside after a few minutes of isolated calm anyway. Like I said, it's the least thought-out decisions. The moves you execute before considering any alternatives.

The night's prose reached a pause the moment I re-entered the house. Have you ever read a sentence so beautiful, so artfully composed, that you had to pause before taking in what came next? Whatever words would have followed in my inconsequential inner monologue had to wait while understanding worked its way from my insides up to the surface of my skin. I stood in the entryway of the house, the remainder of the page forgotten, my brain hurrying to highlight the vision standing across the room, chatting unassumingly with a faceless stranger.

In my book, this chapter doesn't rest flat against its predecessor. Its leaves have grown weathered, puckered and oiled from use. I have so often traced the hopeless lines with my fingers, and I have reread my notes in the margin. Were you to pick me up off my dusty shelf, perhaps it's the first part of me you'd pry open hoping to get a glimpse inside the self I rarely show these days. It'd be the most obvious place to start, the damaged pages standing out from the cleanly pressed ones just so. I'll read it to you, then, and maybe you'll understand. Maybe you won't think less of me at the end.

The chapter starts here, like this: a brush of color on a blank page. He was a medium I was unprepared to navigate, but I immersed myself in his hues.


End file.
